For Hamlet’s soliloquy in Act 4.4, you will analyze Hamlet’s last soliloquy and discuss the following question: Why is this last soliloquy so crucial to our understanding of Hamlet’s character development?
Make sure to note literary techniques and devices that are used to portray Hamlet’s development to the audience, and provide textual evidence to support your reasoning. Do not just summarize the speech.
Requirements
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Make a Google Docs T-‐Chart to record interpretations (with partner)
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Write a reader’s response/journal entry(one page minimum) individually
How all occasions do inform against me, (35)
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not (40)
That capability and god-‐like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd hath but one part wisdom (45)
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge (50)
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Make mouths at mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare, (55)
Even for an egg-‐shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, (60)
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot (65)
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!